Scenes from various episodes of Thakurmar Jhulie

Move over Tintin. Thakuma is here to stay. And Tuntuni will soon follow.

At 10 am this Sunday, a bit of history will be scripted in the field of the fledgling animation industry in eastern India. That is when Thakurmar Jhulie will come alive on Zee Bangla for the 100th time, that, too, as the number one show on the channel.

?It is a tremendous achievement for an Indian company to keep an animated show running this long,? said Zee Bangla business head J.K. Ray, all smiles at a gathering on Wednesday night.

In August 2003, the show was introduced as part of a one-hour children?s block, followed by the ever-popular Tintin, dubbed in Bengali.

?When one thinks animation, one thinks of kids. So, we also took them as our target audience. It is only when the TRP started to climb that we realised that other age-groups were also joining in,? Ray said.

Soon it outstripped Tintin, even in the urban belt. ?That shows that nothing works better than local content,? said the channel?s creative director Oindrila Ghosh.

?We have got an extension of 52 episodes for Thakumar Jhulie as well as the go-ahead for another animated series called Tuntuni,? said Dawsen Infotech CEO V.C. Bhalotia.

Placing the success story in perspective, Ray pointed out that an animated episode costs more than double of a show shot with live figures.

Local folklore cannot be dubbed and broadcast elsewhere to increase revenue. ?The local flavour varies from region to region. In Maharashtra, we would have to make Thakuma wear the sari in a different style. In the southern states, she would have to wear ornaments.?

Another challenge is to match international standards. Said project coordinator Durbadal Mukherjee, who started the show with four teammates: ?There was a lack of trained hands at first. Our quality steadily improved as our firm made a name and animators from other cities joined us.? One such person was Ashim Das, the show?s pre-production in-charge, who has stints in Padmalaya and UTV Toons on his CV. ?From five, we have grown to about 75 now,? he smiled.

The production team, as well as Bhalotia, promise that Tuntuni will be a lot improved technically.

?There were doubts about our standard as we were using Flash. Now we are shifting to a higher-end software,? the Dawsen boss said.

The voice of Thakuma, singer Neepabithi Ghosh, felt that even in the age of Pokemon, fairy tales recreated a sense of wonder lacking in career-oriented studies.

?I know of kids who behave properly on Saturday so that they are allowed to tune in the next morning. I even receive requests from children at my shows to sing the title song.? She concedes that it is strenuous for her bass voice to record in the high-pitched voice of thakuma but the end result is too rewarding to complain.

IT minister Manab Mukherjee may not have made it to the party to celebrate the success of this IT-enabled industry, but the animation industry was present in a body.

Representatives of two schools in the city, Academy of Animation Arts and Technology and Webel Toonz Academy, were there, as were iconic cartoonists Narayan Debnath and Chandi Lahiri.

Lahiri issued an appeal to advertisers to use animation. ?There are quite a few animators graduating from the local institutes. We have to see that more studios come up and they get work here instead of fuelling a go-West dream. ?